


Lost

by breathedout



Series: Passchendaele ficlets [13]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Activism, Argument as, Communism, F/F, Falling In Love, Foreplay, Found Family, Friendship, Nostalgia, The Persistence of Memory, The retroactive shadow of, World War I, and
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 10:56:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22055914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Halifax, Nova Scotia: September 24, 1912Later—it was odd what you remembered—
Relationships: Hazel Cameron & Yves Ouellet, Hazel Cameron/Geneviève Richard
Series: Passchendaele ficlets [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1254113
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: femslashficlets: janelle monae lyric prompt challenge





	Lost

**Author's Note:**

> The folks over at [femslashficlets](https://femslashficlets.dreamwidth.org/) on Dreamwidth are hosting a year-long, 15-ficlet challenge where all the prompts are Janelle Monáe lyrics. I'm using them to create a little cycle of exercises using characters from the three established or hinted-at f/f pairings in the original novel I'm working on. So all of these tiny character studies will be related to one another, and all except three of them will be either Louise/Hazel, Rebecca/Katherine, or Emma/Maisie. Anyone interested in getting to know my characters a little bit as I flesh them out is welcome to follow along!
> 
> This story was written for the prompt "We'll make a million memories, all incredible." Thanks, as always, to my best person [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash) for the speedy beta on these last three ficlets (and all of the ones before). <3

Later—it was odd what a person remembered—

Because there'd been nothing special about that day. Not when you thought about it. And in fact it was the very ordinariness of it, really: all of them sitting in their well-worn spots in the Vernon Street office, with its collection of banged-up tables and wobble-legged chairs. It was nothing, for example, compared to the morning they'd hunched, ecstatic, whooping into the downpour as they'd raced down Coburg toward Vernon, pushing the letterpress machine they'd sourced cheap from Evelyn's uncle's friend's print shop and for which they'd finally, after months of street-corner collections and door-knocking campaigns, pulled together the funds: Yves's laughing eyes meeting Hazel's over the top of the thing as _The means of production!_ he'd shouted, and she'd shaken her sodden curls out of her eyes— _that_ had been, inarguably, a banner day. A moment to which it would make sense, years later—freezing in Petrograd and then exhausted and waterlogged in that endless series of Belgian field hospitals—to think back with tenderness. 

And yet she always revisited instead that one ordinary afternoon. John and Näel sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall, their shoulders almost exactly of a height; Evelyn and Victor and Louis all clustered about the table, with Yves, as he always did, sitting across from them, close to Näel, making a lap-desk of a piece of plywood as he jotted down suggestions from the group in his notebook. And he had looked up; and had turned toward Hazel and Geneviève, who were snugged together in the perch which was not a proper window-seat but just a larger-than-average sill at the bottom of the big picture-window, and onto which they'd propped themselves hip-to-hip, shoulder-to-shoulder, the mullions digging into their backs and the autumn chill seeping down their spines. 

That chill. It'd somehow changed the quality of the heat between them. Between her thigh and Geneviève's. The warmth of her upper arm against Geneviève's hot skin through both their blouses. It had—sharpened it. Leant it a smouldering, crackling, effervescent _something_ that would grow; spread; flush her skin in pinpricks of wet heat which she felt at her elbows; behind her knees; the centres of her palms and the hollow of her throat and between her breasts. Geneviève would shift and Hazel's skin would prickle; a delicious creeping tingling heat converging, sometimes, pooling at the very core of her in a way she almost—

Perhaps that was it: why she thought of that day, in particular. In the heat of the summer, the room was stifling and they'd spread out across it: Geneviève propped on the floor fanning herself with a flyer while Hazel stood against the wall. And in December or January the whole group would crowd around the little wood-stove: each member trying to warm some sliver of their bodies with a radiant heat which only, truth be told, emphasised the surrounding cold. But that day. Early autumn. Sun streaming through the filthy front window, slipping across Hazel's shoulders and across Geneviève's; glowing through Geneviève's waves of dark hair pulled back from her temples, lightening it at the edges so that she had looked, undeniably—yet vexingly, for it was absurdly inaccurate: at that very moment she'd been screaming at Yves in obscene French about some disagreement over the leaflets they'd been designing, one of her hot hands gesturing in the air and the other clenched, unthinking, on Hazel's knee—like an angel. 

Hazel had opened her mouth. Had breathed in the crisp clean yellow autumn air. The chill down her back, and the whole of her pin-stung and dripping. 

A multi-lingual pun. It would come back to her suddenly, apropos of nothing—mud-caked to the knee somewhere outside Lizerne, in the depths of 1917—that that had been the source of the disagreement. Geneviève had come up with this—play on words. And she had turned to Hazel, lit up with her own cleverness, lips parted so that Hazel dry-mouthed, "Oh yes," had said; and then called the phrase "eye-catching." Geneviève's grin and the blush up her neck had caught Hazel unawares and she had felt herself sink down into something—deep—and had thought: what? _Splendour_ , perhaps. _Peril_ ; or—or _Happiness_. Or _Beginning_. _Beginning_ , that's what it had felt like. Nonsense. She'd been nearing thirty, already, and the War—they'd had no idea. Either of them. _Any_ of them; for then Yves— 

Then Yves, loudly, had scoffed. At both of them, but of course more at Geneviève, in the manner of the elder brother he almost might have become to her, in a different world. And Hazel had looked away from Geneviève's lovely face to fall in with him, against him: into the kind of long passionate argument which in those days had perfectly balanced the core four of them against each other: so that when Yves called a pun a ridiculous waste of leaflet space, then _hypocrite_ , Geneviève had said, _you'd have leapt on such a suggestion coming from Hazel_ ; and when Hazel had flushed and pressed Geneviève's hand and had pointed out to Yves that it was, after all, a play on the Russian, and did they not _want_ to appeal to the _narod_ , the salt of the earth; then Näel lounging back against the wall hiding his smile behind his hand had looked up at Yves leaning forward, pounding the table (had he really? Hazel thought, passing him a cigarette as he stood, grey-faced, in Belgium) as he cried out that the _folk_ didn't _know_ Russian, did they, in Halifax—

—and he'd been quite right, Hazel thought. She thought she'd probably known it, really, even at the time. 

It was only: it had been so lovely, just for a day. To keep taut the thread: all of them together, pulled close, in the fading afternoon light.


End file.
